New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club - Fanzines

Fanzines

Perhaps the first form of organised fan activity was around fanzines – unofficial, homemade magazines celebrating the series. Generally these were typed, with hand-drawn illustrations, with the occasional photograph, and were usually photocopied or duplicated in small quantities. In the 1970s there were some early fan activities in Britain, with associated fanzines. One of the first such "'zines" was published by Keith Miller in Edinburgh, at first it was roughly produced, but by the mid-1970s was improved by the switch to photocopying. By about 1975 new staff at the BBC office reduced such help, and Miller's 'zine and associated club were to fade away quite quickly.

Perhaps the "second generation" of such fanzines could be said to be formed around 1975–76, such as TARDIS, around which the DWAS was organised. In Australia, the national Doctor Who Club was similarly established around the 'zine Zerinza in 1976 (to 1986). A quarterly magazine called The Whostorian was published in Newfoundland in conjunction with the As Yet Unnamed Doctor Who Fan Club of Newfoundland (AYUDWFCON).

Other zines from the first decade of fandom included Gallifrey, Oracle, Skaro, Shada and Frontier Worlds. Some information on a few of these can be viewed at fan website Nith Circle of Hell. When the publication of the novelisations was in its infancy (only three being available until the mid-70s, and reference books were either awful or out-of-print, much of the content of the first fanzines was devoted to documenting plots and characters, some interviews, news, book reviews (once Target started a regular schedule), letters, fan fiction and art.

The growth of the merchandise range lead to Marvel's Doctor Who Weekly (later Doctor Who Magazine – DWM). Initially the reference materials were largely reissues of the work done by Jeremy Bentham for DWAS (itself usually reliant on BBC plot outlines). The Weekly was not always very good, and with so many pages being dominated by poor quality US-style comics (few having any of the "flavour" of the British series), meant it was less of a rival to fanzines than at first appeared. But the switch to a monthly format saw it become an increasingly professional rival with better production values than the fanzines could afford. Also the DWM was to be a better source of reference, regular interviews, news from the studio, and with more time being spent preparing each issue. The large array of Target novels, reference books, and start of home video-recording on a big scale by the late 1970s, meant that fanzines shifted focus somewhat. Change was also be to the leading fans growing older, leaving school or university, and so having (sometimes) more money for printing, and higher expectations. As a result, editors began to concentrate more on opinion – fan reviews of stories, debate, and letters. Many of the writers were now graduates, some in media studies, or even working in the BBC itself. In these pre-internet times, most fanzines had active letters pages, which were the main conduit for debate around Doctor Who, especially with a wide geographical spread of so many fans. The need to find new, original content meant that fanzines began to look closer at the series, subjecting stories and characters to ever-deeper analysis, providing detail and discussion unavailable through more "official" channels.

As technology developed, so did fanzines. A move from photocopying to offset litho printing in the early 1980s allowed the bigger selling fanzines to improve print quality, although lower-circulation titles continued to use photocopying for many years after this. Bath-based Skaro was one of the first fanzines to be professionally typeset, but that was virtually the exception as this was such an expensive process. The 1970s–80s fanzines were all produced well before modern, affordable, home computers with crisp laser printers made the revolution that was desktop publishing. Most were produced under difficult conditions, and early editors had to do everything by hand, all their own typing, with no spell check, meaning correcting mistakes was a nightmare, and final lay out could take days, if not weeks.

The mid-1980s has been described by some fans as "the golden age of A5 fanzines", as this period saw an explosion of activity, particularly in the UK. Although the enthusiasm of some editors could not be matched by their resources and many fanzines failed to see a second issue, some of the most popular zines appeared then, including Queen Bat, Star Begotten, Paradise Lost, Spectrox, the Black and White Guardian, Cygnus Alpha, Five Hundred Eyes, Eye Of Horus (in print between 1983–85 and online since 2004) and Purple Haze (edited by Steve O'Brien, later of SFX Magazine).

Format seemed to play a disproportionate role in how a fanzine was perceived, with divisions appearing between the cheaper-looking A5 fanzines and the glossier, more professional A4 "pro-zines" such as The Frame and Private Who. The news-zine Doctor Who Bulletin (DWB) later named Dreamwatch Bulletin) managed to straddle this divide, sometimes controversially, combining a professional A4 magazine format with some of the anarchism and disrespect for authority of the underground. The BBC's discontinuation of the series, and ratings decline, meant that many titles faded out unless backed by a large club.

To a large extent, today fanzines have been replaced by websites, podcasts and discussion boards, but a few do still exist. Many of them are published by fan clubs including the DWAS zine Celestial Toyroom, (which was launched in 1976 and has been published continuously since then, making it the oldest surviving Doctor Who fanzine in the world), the New Zealand Doctor Who Fan Club zine Time-Space Visualiser (TSV) which has been in existence since 1987, the DWIN fanzine Enlightenment which has been published six times a year since 1983, and Data Extract launched by the Doctor Who Club of Australia in 1980. Other individuals and groups still produce fanzines. Black Scrolls was the first prozine to offer a multimedia CDROM on its cover in 2005, featuring interviews with actors, Who-related art, a back issue archive and an alternative voice-over commentary for one of the episodes and the distinction of being professionally printed and entirely in colour which was a modest success that ran for eight issues between 1993 and 2005. Doctor Who Fanzines FANWNAK and Vworp! Vworp! are among the full colour A4, printed fanzines available today, as well as others such as Panic Moon, The Finished Product which are smaller sizes and black and white. Many fanzines still take the time-honoured route of printing and distributing their zine by mail, but many now distribute their fanzine as downloadable and printable PDFs such as Planet of the Ming Mongs, finally removing what was often the main cause for a fanzine's closure, the cost of printing and distribution - but in so doing also losing the appeal of a unique hardcopy publication, and therefore the only true identifier of a 'fanzine'. It's likely that as this trend increases new terminology will replace the term fanzine, which is already archaic and out-of-place in online contexts.

Many professional Doctor Who writers, for both the current TV series and the books, began their careers writing for fanzines, including Paul Cornell, Rob Shearman, Matt Jones, Marc Platt, Gareth Roberts, Clayton Hickman, David Howe and Stephen James Walker.